srshea -> RE: Forum Etiquette (Jan. 15 2009 12:29:59)
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First of all, I’m in full agreement with everything that’s been mentioned here so far. I’m a chronic door-holder-opener and I always address elderly folks as “sir” and “ma’am”, so politeness and etiquette are pretty important to me. I’m also a strong advocate of healthy, vigorous debate, even argument, so long as it remains within the bounds of a mutually shared respect between all parties involved, and it’s definitely nice when all of the above works together harmoniously and we get a nice active place where all sorts of ideas and opinions start flying around but nobody gets their eye poked out. I’ve mentioned before that this is the only forum I’ve ever taken part in, and so my frame of reference is a bit limited, but I think the Foro on the whole works very, very well in its set-up, administration, and in the overall manner in which its members going about putting the thing to use. But I do have one idea I’d like to float, as it touches on some of the stuff being addressed here and might be useful in keeping the emotional tone of the Foro operating healthily: The rating system: always been my least favorite aspect of the Foro. When someone posts something that’s really helpful and informative and very positive, or when someone bravely uploads some of their own playing, then it’s nice to be able to give them “five stars” in acknowledgement of their contribution. But the whole “negative star” thing is generally unhelpful and I think fosters a very unpleasant, corrosive atmosphere at times. There are some definitely some lousy posts out there that are certainly deserving of some sort of thumbs-down, but I think in the end the negative star rating hurts more than it helps. I think it can too easily be used as a passive aggressive means of getting into a tussle with someone without being up front about it, and that sort of communication style generally doesn’t have good results. A lot of the time it just operates as a sort of neon sign, drawing everybody’s attention to the fact that some sort of trouble’s brewing. It’s like someone yelling “Fight! Fight!” in the school yard, and we all come running. At its worst it just devolves into a couple of folks negatively rating each other’s posts, not as a response to the actual content of the posts, but because they’re hashing out some personal grievances. And the spectrum of the “-2” to “+2”, one to five star rating thing, is also confusing. That three-star “zero” rating seems like the ultimate in passive aggression. When I see that one I always get a queasy feeling and I see it as being worse than one star. So, just some thoughts. I know that the rating system is a function of the Foro’s software, and I don’t know to what extent it can or cannot be changed, but my own modest-proposal opinion would be that the ideal rating scenario would either be to have a system whereby one can give some kind of thumbs-up to a helpful post, or to have no rating system at all.
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